By Paul Henderson
RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the final installment in my series about our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.
By Paul Henderson
I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.
By Michel Genard
I was at the Freescale conference this week (FTF2010 in Orlando, FL) and the Wednesday’ key note speech from Hugh Herr was truly inspiring in a lot of dimensions. First, at human being level, Hugh after suffering severe amputations of his legs (a climbing accident), instead of resigning to his condition to be forever disabled, he decided to study the field of biomechatronics, becomes an associate professor at MIT and designed prosthesis to turn his handicap as an advantage and he is climbing again! Secondly from an education perspective, he is clearly a very good teacher and knows well how to convey complex problems and challenges in easy to understand concept.
By Paul Henderson
Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected]and I will send it to you.
In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.
By Mark Hermeling
Bill-of-material is something that is important in many devices and I have argued before that virtualization can help with this. Say you have a medical device like an MRI scanner, it is not uncommon that this device has three processors that collaborate. One processor, often in a separate box like an industrial PC, runs MS Windows and is the operator interface, possibly with touch-screen GUI. This is where the results are displayed.
By Jakob Engblom
The new Freescale QorIQ P5020 SoC that was announced this week at the Freescale Technology Forum means that yet another chip family has now moved to 64 bits from 32 bits. This is a familiar scenario that has been played out many times before, starting in the mid-1990s as Sun, IBM and MIPS upgraded their server processor architectures to 64 bits. Before that, we had Intel extending the x86 family from 16 bits to 32 bits and IBM extending the System/360 architecture from 24 bits to 31 bits. Each time, the changed caused software pain for a while as the software is updated to work in the new world with more bits to use. It is also something that Simics has helped with in the past.
By Mark Hermeling
Well, I surely hope you haven't, hospitals are not my favorite places, they are a fertile ground for embedded systems though. Many of the devices in the hospital consist of an instrument part and a user interface (Human Machine Interface). The device could be an MRI scanner, or a a relatively simple blood analyzer. The Human Machine Interface on these devices control the instrument(s) provide feedback on the measurements and possibly interacts with a back office system.
By Paul Henderson
I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.
The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest. So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails.
By Mark Hermeling
I have been back in Ottawa now for just over a week after my 5 week trip through Europe and am working through my notes from the past month. And what a month it has been, in an earlier post I jokingly declared 2010 the year of embedded virtualization and this is certainly ringing true.
An overview of the activities of last month will present a decent picture of the status of embedded virtualization and the interest.
By Paul Henderson
Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.
Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.
By Paul Henderson
Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.
The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.
The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.
By Eddie Glenn
Developing large systems is a lot like trying to get an appreciation of the Amazon when you’re standing beneath a single tree in the middle of it. Sure, there’s a lot that you can find out about that single tree. You can look at its trunk, its leaves, and its branches. You could take soil measurements around the tree to determine if it is getting the proper nutrients.
But, the health of that single tree is often determined by what’s going on around it. If your perspective is limited to just that tree, then you’re going to miss the jungle. You won’t see how the various streams feed into the rivers, how one part of the ecosystem feeds another part which feeds another part. Simply put, if that single tree is in distress, how can you fix it without looking at what’s going on around it?
By Mark Hermeling
Events such as ESC in San Jose this week are a great way to talk to a lot of customers in a very short timespan. Hence, a great place to be for a product manager like myself. The conversations show a clear difference between leaders in multicore adoption and followers of that adoption.
The discussions with the followers typically start of a bit timid. They are often afraid of multicore and see it as a necessary evil. After a while, they warm up and they start to see that the migration does not need to be very complicated, yes, it is work, but work that can be managed and controlled.
By Jakob Engblom
As you might have seen, Wind River recently acquired Simics, a product
formerly sold by Virtutech. My colleagues Michel Genard and Bill Graham recently blogged on the topic.
Simics can have a huge impact on the product development processes, time-to-market and quality. Apart from the cool things that Simics does to improve the development process, it is also a very interesting technology in and by itself.
By Bill Graham
Wind River's CTO, Tomas Evensen gave a keynote
at the Multicore Expo in San Jose entitled "Surviving the Software
Avalanche: Simplifying Multicore". There certainly has been much
discussion of multicore by many people (myself included) over the years
but we are getting to a point now that we are seeing multicore use cases
coalescing in the marketplace.
I think a lot of us learn better by example and when we see multicore used in a real customer use cases, we see the benefit and value much more.
By Mark Hermeling
Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to
multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your
current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what
your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your
current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.
This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.
By Michel Genard
I wished I was a virtual system. We take for granted that access to
the infrastructure is always on and available for telecommunications,
broadband, and travel. Well, some ashes from the remote volcano brought
human beings back to earth.
I am in France right now, part of a two-week EMEA tour to visit our field and customers, and I am grounded; I can’t travel to Sweden and I still don’t know when I will make it back to the U.S. The icing on the cake is that the France union decided on another French specialty (not culinary): a train strike. So I’m going to use virtual infrastructure (i.e., WebEx) to take care of my meeting this week; not so bad after all. I could have been stuck in a worse place than Paris.
By Mark Hermeling
Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.
I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.
By Mark Hermeling
Nice
blog post from Ed Sperling on the performance of modern day processors.
Some interesting tidbits from his post:
By Mark Hermeling
Discussions with customers about multicore and virtualization often
provides them with new insights with respect to the designs that they
can use to build their systems. One particular discussion that I had
last week was with a customer that is building a device that needs a
particular level of service quality.
In the past they had looked at adding another processor to the system, but were never able to do so due to limited space and power budgets.
By Mark Hermeling
In several of my previous posts I have written about the fact that embedded virtualization has low overhead, maintains determinism and all that good stuff. I have also written about some of the benefits of virtualization due to partitioning, scalability and such.
However, there is one aspect of virtualization that gets little 'air time' and that is the fact that there the hypervisor really is a nice, lean, partitioned management layer of your multicore (or single core) hardware.
By Michel Genard
I am going to make a bold statement: Go virtual to create reality.
Seems crazy enough?
According to Wikipedia, reality means "the state of things as they actually exist.” The concept of existence can be elusive, because to exist, something doesn’t need to be real; it just needs to have its own relevance. Often we humans use simplified terms to explain complex concepts or situations and we describe phenomena in mathematical equations. We do it all the time in many domains such as philosophy, physics, nuclear, and chemistry, and it works.
By Mark Hermeling
I received a bunch of emails today pointing to this blog from Jason Perlow. Jason has an interesting thought with regards to the Apple and HTC lawsuit that is brewing. Let me first say that I understand that companies have to protect their IP and that there are clearly important and enforceable patents out there, say Coca Cola's formula for well, Coca Cola. Apple certainly has a lot of valuable IP as well and they are spending a lot of dollars in making the user experience better. Some of these patents are vague at best, so I have mixed feelings on this and since I am not a lawyer I am going to leave it at that.
Jason's blog evolves around hypervisors and his fantasy world in which they can change the way we build mobile phones. This is not a fantasy world, in the fact that what Jason wants is technically very possible. However, it would also require alliances between some of the fiercest competitors in one of the biggest markets in the world. Unlikely to happen, however, allow me to dream with him.
By Mike Deliman
MRO recently passed a milestone of bringing back more data than all
previous deep space missions combined. To do this MRO was equipped
with a large dish antenna and powerful radio, and is running a more
powerful computer than it's companions on and orbiting Mars. It gets a
fair share of antenna time from the DSN antennae on the ground.
Science means collecting data, processing it for it's information, and analyzing the information. All of these activities can be greatly facilitated by some degree of computer assistance. When it comes to remote-operated scientists (rovers, gliders, orbiters, diggers, swimmers, crawlers, hover-ers..) the computer has to do all the work.
By Mark Hermeling
A great number of cores gives more processing power, but this power
needs to be harnessed. The easiest way to control a sea of cores is of
course to run a single operating system over this sea in a Symmetric
MultiProcessing mode (SMP). Most modern operating systems support this
(which includes Wind River Linux and VxWorks of course).
The trick is to minimize the impact of Amdahl's law. This law describes the maximum theoretically attainable speedup on your multicore processor. Given a N core multicore processor, one would expect an application to run N times as fast, at least ideally.
By Mark Hermeling
Developing for multicore often asks for new approaches to architecting
embedded systems. A low-core-count multicore processor, say a 2 or 4
core processor, could be configured to use a single operating system in a
SMP configuration.
This would give one single OS control over both cores and is often a valid configuation. The OS should have features such as core affinity and core reservation. The former will lock a process to a core, but will allow other processes to use the core as well, the latter reserves a core for the exclusive use of a single process.
By Emeka Nwafor
By Mark Hermeling
As you would expect from a market leader like Wind River, we have
been busy, extremely busy. Busy with talking to customers and helping
them define how they plan to adopt multicore and virtualization in their
roadmaps, but also busy with progressing our own roadmap.
Today we are announcing Wind River Hypervisor 1.1, with added support for the Intel Nehalem micro architecture (i5, i7 and Xeon 55xx), support for VxWorks 6.8 and Wind River Linux 3.0.2, additional inter-board communication facilities and On-Chip Debugging Support. The official press release is here.
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